Embodiments of the disclosure relate generally to methods and systems for computer systems and more particularly, to methods and systems for constructing scalable feed-forward processes.
It is difficult and expensive to develop a complex process to produce complex systems such as an aerospace product or a power plant. A specially constructed information model representing a process which can grow or shrink if necessary, provide multiple layers of planning and progress visibility, and provide high certainty of a desired result will generate a less difficult and less expensive implementation of the process than a model constructed in a less formal or ad-hoc fashion. However, constructing such a process model is in itself a difficult and expensive task.
A product may be described in terms of its component breakdown. A process describing the construction of such a product may be defined by describing the tasks and precedences associated with the creation of each component. The process describing the creation of a given physical product may seem intuitive since its physical realization, through production and assembly, will test the feasibility of such a process. Products whose components do not have an obvious physical manifestation, such as the information produced and consumed during the design and development of an aerospace product, are produced by processes which may not be intuitively verifiable.
Existing methods approach modeling processes graphically through flow charts, schematics or diagrams. The modeler represents the process as perceived by others or himself. There is no analytical foundation to validate the representation or to determine its feasibility or evaluate its internal dynamics. Without a validation or feasibility context, it is undeterminable whether the process can provide the expected results based on this representation. Expectations of the internal behavior of processes are currently non-existent for large scale complex processes like product development. The enforcement of some kind of model structure is not evident, leaving dissimilar characteristics of a process not recognizable and resulting in over-simplification to avoid dilemmas or aspects of the process that are not explainable.
Existing approaches do not model the innate complexity of a large-scale process in a manner to understand or overcome the conditions which contribute to poor performance experienced during development program execution. Therefore they do not provide the visibility necessary to understand how the lack of large-scale integration manifests on development programs. As a result, the unnecessary and unplanned rework, inappropriate concurrency, duplicative work and unacknowledged internal complex iteration are not avoidable, resulting in extended development time and cost overruns. Existing approaches are not oriented towards combining and reusing processes in new contexts.
What are needed are methods and systems for constructing scalable robust feed-forward processes.